1) “Once in a while—not quite often enough to be a crisis, but just often enough to be a trope—people in the United States will freak out because a huge number of highly popular websites and services have suddenly gone down” (Burrington).
The phrase “gone down” makes the sentences ambiguous and can assign to it two different, but not mutually exclusive, meanings. The phrasal verb “go down” can be attributed to the number – then it will mean the reduction in the amount, and to the websites in the IT sphere – then it will mean that the website (or the PC) stopped working. To avoid this ambiguity, we can substitute the words “gone down” by a neutral variant – “stopped working/functioning” or by a more specific word – “got stuck/got locked up/frozen”.
2) “Postwar suburbanization and the expansion of transportation networks are occasionally overlooked, but weirdly crucial facets of the military-industrial complex” (Burrington).
The word “overlooked” conveys ambivalent meaning by its semantics. It can be defined as “examined, looked at, or watched” and at the same time it can denote lack of attention, not noticing something. The fact that one and the same word has two opposite denotations is extremely important in the text, since it can turn the meaning upside down. To avoid ambiguity, we suggest substituting the word “overlooked” by “neglected” or “ignored”.
3) “Due to SEC regulations COPT hasn’t publicly disclosed the actual tenant or their particular role in building new AWS data centers in northern Virginia, but reports of COPT building an AWS data center in 2013 surfaced a few months before the CIA announced they’d awarded a $600 million contract to Amazon to build cloud services for the U.S. intelligence community” (Burrington).
The word “surfaced” in the following context conveys ambiguity with two mutually exclusive, opposite meanings – it can either mean “revealed” or, vice versa, “concealed”. In the context stated above it is very important to understand what it means, since it can represent a company hiding its real reports and matters or as a company with a transparent policy and clear recording. Studying the context of only one sentence, we can understand that the author wanted to say “revealed”, so we suggest using this word or its synonym instead.
4) “In part, the success of Amazon Web Services — arguably the success of The Cloud itself at this point—lies in its ability to abstract infrastructural problems into logistics problems. And for a long time, Amazon has been able to abstract away a lot of the more discomforting or difficult facets of its infrastructure” (Burrington).
In the next passage the author speaks about the success of Amazon Web Services and uses the word “abstract” with ambiguous meaning in his argument explaining the advance of AWS. On the one hand, it may mean that AWS separate infrastructural problems into logistics problems and handle them individually. On the other hand, it may imply that the company transfers infrastructural problems to the sphere of logistics. These two ideas don’t contradict each other but can be treated differently, so we need to substitute the word “abstract” by a synonym – either by “pass” or by “separate”.
5) “Over the last three years, that percentage has most likely only increased. Finding more recent numbers is tricky, although it seems agreed upon that Amazon is the largest hosting company operating today, projected to exceed $8 billion this year alone” (Burrington).
In the above-mentioned quotation the word “tricky” implies double meaning, with two possible, mutually exclusive denotations. Finding data may be considered as an easy matter and at the same time a difficult task. The previous sentence and the conjunction “although” help to convey the correct idea. To get rid of misunderstanding and leave a clear meaning, it would be better to write “intricately” or “a hard matter” instead of “tricky”.
Works Cited
Burrington, Ingrid. "Why Amazon's Data Centers Are Hidden in Spy Country."The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 8 Jan. 2016. Web. 15 June 2016.
